Homemade upright bass - The Diddley Bass

Every time a new instrument falls into my hands, I always wonder why I never got round to learning bass guitar. From where I'm looking, there's no better instrument for when you gotta get groovin'.

Over the last few days, I've been listening a lot to Seasick Steve and various other players of the 'Diddley Bow', a simple form of guitar that most often has one or two strings. It looks and sounds something like this:



I figured that surely it was possible to make a bass version, and so took a trip to the nearest Homebase (a hardware store) to pick up the parts for mine. The hardest bit, apart from screwing in the bolts without a drill, was probably drinking the 3 bottles of beer required to make it. It ended up looking like this:

I currently use a screwdriver and a bottle of Peroni as a beater and a slide, respectively. It's a bit quiet, so I'm going to try and fit a pickup when I get a chance. The 'bridge' is a bottle of Old Speckled Hen, and the 'nut' another bottle of Peroni. I'll upgrade to other bottles to experiment later - rumour has it that Jack Daniels offers the best 'tone' ;-)

It's 'tuned' to F#, but hopefully when I get something that isn't 'borrowed' fence wire, it'll be easier to adjust. I might get a bass machine head to make that particular pain in the arse easier.

This machine kills any pretense at skill :)